What happens to teamwork when AI becomes the first collabortor?
Project
Parsons Capstone Research
Timeline
Sep - Dec 2025
I explored how AI is changing the way designers think, create, and make decisions together. Our research uncovered a shift from co-creation to co-evaluation and identified where AI-supported workflows could better preserve collective thinking.
Scope of Work
Context
AI is changing more than how designers work.
As designers increasingly think and create with AI, we wanted to understand what this new Hybrid Intelligence means for teamwork, and how AI-native teams can evolve without losing the human values behind creativity and collaboration.
Research at a Glance
We looked at what Gen AI is changing, why it’s happening, and where we can intervene.
WHAT we found
From Co-creation to Co-evaluation
As AI enters the room before human teammates, designers review ideas rather than building them together.
Design Process Map
WHY it matters
We lose the space to think together
As the market competes for production speed, creative conflict can disappear from the design process.
Iceberg Model
WHAT we built
Team-centered AI ideation system
Proposed 4 core values and 3 design principles to develop digital collaboration space.
Opportunity Matrix
Link to full report
Research Planning
How we defined what was worth investigating
We broke down a broad context about AI and design teamwork into a focused research direction, a framework for data collection, and a research plan for gathering evidence.
Link to the research proposal
So, WHAT is changing?
Design work becomes AI-first & Human-react, and that created 3 key shifts in how we work, think, and feel as a team.
Key drivers : What shapes these shifts
We identified key drivers accelerating these shifts in individuals and organizational level.
Organizations adopt AI in varied ways influenced by their culture, risk tolerance, and governance. Senior designers harness AI to streamline tasks while maintaining creative control, whereas junior designers may overly rely on AI for structure and ideation, risking the development of habits that prioritize AI logic over personal exploration and interpretation.
Why "AI-first Human-react" feels inevitable?
Three systemic forces are accelerating these changes.
AI is accerlating creative work by addressing common challenges such as starting with a blank page and managing time pressure. However, many AI tools are designed to maximize user engagement, offering direct answers and continuous suggestions, which can foster dependency. This shift towards productivity often overlooks the importance of collaboration and exploration, as current AI systems prioritize individual efficiency over collective insight, suggesting a need for a more balanced approach in their design and implementation.
Why it matters?
From Co-creation to
Co-evaluation
AI is not simply changing how quickly teams work.
It is shifting collaboration from thinking and creating together
toward individually generating and collectively evaluating outputs.
We created a map to show the evolution of design collaboration. This change goes beyond new tools; it transforms roles, alters collaboration methods, and impacts team members' emotional and cognitive experiences. Explore more by clicking the nodes on the left side of the map.
Link to the full Design Process Map
Discover
From collective framing to individual + AI framing
Select a card to explore research observations. Arrows organize the story; they do not represent measured causal effects.
Collective framing → Individual + AI framing
Changes to the workflow captured in the research synthesis.
This shift put four design values at risks. These impact to team work as well.
Design Opportunity
How might we help teams feel they are discovering solutions together, not separately through AI?
We reorient core design values for collaboration to build team-centered AI.
What we built
explAIn : Team-AI Ideation Engine for Shared Reasoning
As AI takes on more activities across the design process, our research surfaced four values that become increasingly important for collaborative creative work.
Part 2. Product Dev & Market Strategy
Behind the research
How we find WHERE we intervene
To identify intervention areas, we mapped 20 specific design actions onto a 2x2 matrix based on cognitive and affective mechanisms. We designated the design actions in Quadrant 1 as the primary focus of our intervention.
PRIORITY CRITERIA
Team Brain
Does this action build shared understanding?
Team Heart
Does this action build trust and bonding?
